A New Twist on Using Green Chiles

Ah !  The aroma of roasting green chiles!  If only that pungent smell could be captured and bottled for future use.  Alas, like many pleasures in life, "essence of green chiles" can be enjoyed only for the moment.  

The chile crop matures around Labor Day each year in the Desert Southwest. Soon roadside stalls and even urban grocery stores are selling large cardboard boxes of long green chiles, roasted on site for an extra fee.

Chile roasting

My family buys and freezes about 50 pounds of these chiles each season.  This year, however, my husband, Wayne, checked our chile supply in the freezer and announced that we still have plenty of chiles left from last season.  How could this be?  Running out of chiles has always been a major household concern.  Now we have such a surplus that we don't have to shop for chiles this year?  Are we getting bored with the same old uses for green chiles?

Every Southwesterner can tick off ten uses for green chiles: Chile con queso, Green chile soup, Green chile stew, Chiles rellenos, Green chile enchiladas, Chiles stuffed with guacamole, Scrambled eggs and green chiles, Southwestern cornbread, and even Cranberry Sauce with green chiles.

Maybe what I need is a new cooking inspiration.  I checked the kitchen cookbook collection and discovered a book I hadn't opened in years:  The Hatch Chile Cookbook (1994) written by David G. Jackson and Mark Preston and published by B Publishers, Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Hatch, New Mexico, known as the Chile Capital of the World, is a small town about a two and a half hour drive from my hometown of El Paso, Texas.  I found three recipes that may make me wish I had replenished our chile supply.

The first is called "Freezer Salsa del Sol "(p. 49).  This recipe appealed to me because it looks incredibly easy.  Into a large stock pot, put the following ingredients:

8 cups chopped tomatoes
2 cups green tomatoes
2 cups chopped onions
3 cups diced green chiles
3 teaspoons oregano
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 half teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon cilantro

Bring ingredients to a boil and simmer, uncovered for five minutes.  Set aside to cool and freeze in freezer containers. Will keep for a year frozen or seven days in the refrigerator.

The next recipe for "Robert's Cranberry Chile Cheese Bread" (p. 159)  would be good to mix up on a cool autumn day.

Combine the following dry ingredients:

4 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Then cut into the dry mixture 2 tablespoons margarine or shortening.

In another bowl, combine the following ingredients:

4 tablespoons chopped green chiles
1/2 cup crushed walnuts
1 1/2 grated cheddar cheese
1 cup cranberries, halved
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 tablespoons grated orange peel
Juice from 1 orange, mixed with enough water to yield about a cup of liquid.

Combine wet and dry ingredients.  Bake in two greased loaf pans at 350 degrees for 60-70 minutes

And finally, I found a recipe for "Rice Stuffed Bell Peppers" (p. 167) that I must have made many years ago, because it had a large check mark and the word "Outstanding!" written beside it. (I often make notes in my cookbooks.)

4 green bell peppers, tops removed, deveined and seeded
4 tablespoons chopped onions
4 tablespoons chopped red bell pepper
4 tablespoons chopped green chiles
2 slices of bacon, fried and crumbled
3 cups tomatoes
3 cups cooked rice
butter or margarine
4 tablespoons brown sugar
4 teaspoons lemon juice

Prepare bell peppers and set aside.  Saute onions, red bell pepper, green chiles and bacon.  Add tomatoes and break up with a spoon.  Add cooked rice.  If you like a spicier mixture, add a liquid hot sauce.  Fill bell peppers, top with butter, and sprinkle with brown sugar and lemon juice.  Bake in a glass casserole to which a little warm water has been added.  Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Long green chiles are plentiful, affordable, nutritious, and, of course, delicious.  They combine well with other tastes, even sweet tastes.

May your chiles last until next season!

Brrr. It's time to prepare the Official State Dish of Texas

It's not this cold in El Paso today,  thankfully.

Yes, the cold front blew in last night, just like the weathercasters predicted. Gone were my hopes for a southwestern Indian summer lasting forever.  With highs predicted today only in the 50's (that translates to "really cold" to a southwesterner), I found myself craving a warm bowl of chile con carne.  (It has been the official Texas state dish since 1977.)

Let's get the nitpicking over with first.  "Chile" or "chili"?  My vote is for the first, but sometimes the automatic spell checker doesn't approve of that choice.  There are also other important decisions to be made before making chile con carne.  Beans or no beans?  And just how much chile should be used in chile con carne?

Which brings up another point.  When I use the word "chile" in culinary discussions with friends who are not from the southwest, I generally mean the green or red vegetable.  We eat "chile" in some form almost every day at our house.  But when people without a chile habit say “chile”, they generally mean “chile con carne.”  So when I go into raptures about stuffed “chiles,” I get some strange looks.  I’ll use the shortened name for the dish here. Now that those important points are settled, let’s explore how to make a great bowl of chile. 

Let me confess that my former attempts to produce a bowl of chile that tastes like the restaurant variety have not succeeded.  I think I have discovered the reason.  A recipe in Texas Home Cooking by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison, listed as “Sam Perdergrast’s Old-Time Texas Restaurant Chili” (pp. 125-126), sheds some light on the topic.  They explain that the unflattering term “greasy spoon” to describe an eatery of dubious quality originated from the chile con carne that was served which had “enough grease to lubricate a Model T.”  What an image!

My goal as a home cook is to prepare healthy dishes that are also tasty.  I chose three Texas cookbooks from the kitchen shelf to research chile recipes. And there are many of them!  They appear to have these ingredients in common:

Ground meat

Onions and garlic

Spices like cumin (comino), oregano, salt and pepper

Something tomatoey – tomato sauce or canned tomatoes

Some kind of hot chile – from dried chile pods reconstituted in hot water and blended to chile powder to Tabasco sauce

Cornmeal or masa flour to thicken

Other suggested additions were cooked beans, red or green bell peppers, and even a bar of milk chocolate candy. I have the impression from reading a variety of recipes that there is much room for innovation and individualization of chile con carne recipes.   

So that’s what I’m going to do - experiment with making a healthy but delectable bowl of chile.  I’ll check the kitchen for supplies (it’s way too cold and windy to venture out to the grocery store) and see what I come up with.  If my chile con carne is a success, I’ll feature it in my next blog post.  If not, well, you can guess the result.